Guns N’ Roses announce Toronto stop on 2023 world tour

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Guns N’ Roses are set to hit the road for an extensive headlining tour that will find the veteran rockers headlining stadiums, festivals, and arenas throughout the summer and fall.

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This will be the first time the group have toured North America since the We’re F’N Back! trek in 2021.

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Their now-legendary Not In This Lifetime… Tour, which ran from 2016-2019, stands out as the “third-highest grossing tour of all time.”

The latest run of shows kicks off on June 5 in Israel and includes dates across Europe before touching down in North America in August.

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The band will play four Canadian shows, including Moncton’s Medavie Blue Cross Stadium (Aug. 5), Montreal’s Parc Jean Drapeau (Aug. 8), Toronto’s Rogers Centre (Sept. 3) and Vancouver’s BC Place (Oct. 16).

Fan club pre-sales start Wednesday with a general on-sale taking place Friday, Feb. 24.

In the announcement, GN’R teased the possibility of new music writing that they will be “unveiling more news and surprises soon.”

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After an acrimonious split in the mid-1990s, lead vocalist Axel Rose continued to tour under the band name and released the platinum-selling Chinese Democracy in 2008.

Rose reunited with original guitarist Slash and original bassist Duff McKagan for what was only supposed to be a short run of shows in 2016. But after decades apart, the trio, who are now joined by Dizzy Reed (keyboard), Richard Fortus (rhythm guitar), Frank Ferrer (drums), and Melissa Reese (keyboard), quickly fell back in love with one another onstage.

“When we got back together, that whole chemistry and that thing that makes what Guns N’ Roses is for me and Axl and Duff, it all just sort of came together,” Slash told CNN in 2021. “After that long a period of time, we’d sort of forgotten what that was like.

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“Everybody got along great,” he added. “That’s actually why the tour has kept going, because initially it was just going to be a couple of shows.”

The reunion came as a surprise to Slash, who told the Sun in 2014 that he had stopped wondering what might have happened if the band had been able to keep its original lineup together.

“I don’t think about that because that’s not what happened, so what’s the point?” Slash said. “People are always like, ‘What if you had done things differently?’ Not only with GN’R. But it’s just such a waste of time. Things happened and it’s done. I sort of loathe looking back and fantasizing about anything one way or another because in the end it didn’t happen.”

For a full list of tour dates, visit gunsnroses.com.

mdaniell@postmedia.com